Sunbird is back, bringing iMessage to Android (again)

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The Sunbird app was launched in 2022 and allowed Android users to chat via iMessage with iPhone owners. Unfortunately, it shut down a year later and was pulled from the Google Play Store. Now, the team has announced that Sunbird is back.

The Sunbird team announced the app’s relaunch in an emailed press release, noting that it’s available to everyone via the Google Play Store. Messages sent by Sunbird users will indeed show up as blue bubbles on iPhones rather than the green bubbles associated with Android and other non-Apple platforms.

This app doesn’t just stop at giving Android users blue bubbles, according to Sunbird Messaging CEO Danny Mizrahi. The executive claims that iMessage features like reactions, replies, high-quality video, and group management all work via Sunbird for Android.

Of course, the main reason why Sunbird was pulled in the first place was because it was a security nightmare. Investigations found that user data was stored in clear text and that the encryption claims fell short of reality. This was particularly embarrassing for Nothing at the time, as the smartphone brand launched the Nothing Chats app atop Sunbird’s foundation.

However, the team has touched on the relaunched app’s security improvements:

We had some questions when we saw the aforementioned claim that messages are only retained long enough to be delivered. Mizrahi expanded on this in an emailed response to Android Authority questions:

Furthermore, Mirazhi told us that an independent security auditing firm tested its rebuilt Sunbird app in a bid to replicate findings from a 2023 security report . The firm apparently failed to replicate these discoveries and reported “no critical vulnerabilities” in the app or backend API.